2013 Recap: 10 Over-the-Top Foods We Ate This Year

It's often said that every story has already been told, and new ones are just variations on the same themes. Transfer that analogy to food and put it in the competitive pressure cooker of 2013, and you've got the year in food. No one seemed content to create simple, new recipes. Instead, the culinary-minded combined already complicated foods and drinks, with each iteration adding on more and more to one-up the previous ones. Here are 10 epic concoctions that had us talking this year.

The Cronut

Could anyone have predicted the hysteria that would result when pastry chef Dominique Ansel combined a croissant and a donut? Definitely not, but that's the only word that properly describes what happened. It also helped that Ansel only made a certain number of cronuts every day and put a cap on the number people could purchase, which led to early-morning lines of cronies trying to get their pastry fix outside his New York City bakery.